terrific fatigue

That’s the Bayonne Bridge, mentioned a couple of times this week, spanning the busy Kill Van Kull. The last “regular” Working Harbor Committee excursion of the year was recently enacted, and we encountered sometimes heavy weather and an overcast sky which laid down a pall of preternatural darkness upon the harbor. The air itself was thick with fog and mist, and many were the times which I needed to clear my lens of condensates.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Denizens of the harbor used to such visual occlusion, the working vessels and tugs kept to their normal routines. Hushed intonations have been offered to your humble narrator in the past suggesting that a suite of electronics are commonly found onboard these machines. These esoteric devices neutralize the need for direct line of sight, allowing the operator to remotely sense the environment around them.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The shadowed shoreline observed in these shots is the so called “Chemical Coast” of New Jersey. The name was earned in an earlier century, when Bayonne was famed for its mastery of colorant and dye manufacture, before the oil industry arrived with the Rockefellers.

2 Responses

One of the plants that I believe is near there, Kuehne chemical, stores large quantities of chlorine gas.

In the event of a “worst case scenario”, that facility puts millions of New Yorkers at risk.

“According to the Kuehne Chemical Company’s own
reports to the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA), its South Kearny New Jersey facility puts
12,000,000 people at risk in the New Jersey-New York
City area due to the bulk storage of 2 million pounds
of chlorine gas. This plant puts more people at risk of
a chemical disaster than any other plant in the U.S.”